UN’s Future in Question: Navigating Challenges of Past and Present

“The longer we don’t reform the Security Council the more the council’s credibility suffers’’

Betul Yuruk

In this exclusive interview, Richard Gowan, a seasoned expert on the United Nations with two decades of experience, shares his insights on the organization’s past, present, and future challenges.  As the head of advocacy at the International Crisis Group, Gowan discusses topics ranging from Security Council reform to the complexities of peacekeeping missions and the need to ensure the UN remains relevant in today’s global landscape. This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.

How has the perception of the United Nations evolved over time? What are some key differences in how the UN was perceived in the past compared to how it is perceived today?

I arrived in New York and started covering the UN at a moment when a lot of diplomats thought the institution was in an existential crisis. In 2005, there were very raw memories of the debates over the Iraq War and the fact that the US had invaded Iraq without UN authorization. There was a big UN reform effort at that time leading up to the 2005 World Summit, and there was a huge amount of discussion about Security Council reform. This was a time when a lot of UN members thought that it was essential to reshape the Security Council because it had lost a lot of credibility over Iraq. It’s ironic that 20 years later, we are once again in a situation where because of events between Russia and Ukraine and because of Russia’s use of its veto to defend its aggression and more recently the US use of the veto over Gaza we’re suddenly having very similar debates again. There’s a real concern that the organization has lost a huge amount of credibility, there’s a lot of frustration around the UN with the Security Council and there’s a lot of talk about Security Council reform. So I have been here for almost 20 years, but oddly the conditions today feel comparable to the conditions 20 years ago. A lot has changed however. I think that from 1989 and the end of the Cold War, for almost two decades despite many horrible failures like the Rwandan genocide, most states believed that the UN was gaining strength and gaining responsibility and certainly 20 years ago UN peacekeeping was seen as a really important part of the international security toolbox. I think now in a period of growing geopolitical competition there’s less confidence about the state of the UN and there’s less confidence that UN tools like peacekeeping and mediation can help not only in situations like Ukraine but also in places like Haiti. In 2006 I went to Haiti and spent time with UN peacekeepers there, there were Brazilian marines in Port-au-Prince fighting the gangs. Nearly two decades later there is another law and order crisis in Haiti but no one really wants to send the Blue Helmets to fix it.

‘’A lot of small, non-Western states are frustrated by the fact that they feel that a lot of the power here continues to rest with a fairly small club of Western countries’’

Richard Gowan, UN Director at International Crisis Group. Photo/Aspet Manukyan

There has been a lot of criticisms that the UN is not fit for today’s world. What pivotal event or series of events marked the tipping point where the UN lost a significant amount of credibility?

I think there have been criticisms of the UN since the 1940s. You can find articles from the 1940s and 50s in which scholars were saying that the UN was not achieving the promise of the San Francisco Conference in 1945. I remember soon after I started working here, a veteran expert on the UN from Canada told me the UN is always in crisis. There’s always a sense that the UN is not living up to its capabilities and expectations. Obviously the UN’s failures in Rwanda and in Bosnia in the 1990s did the organization a lot of harm, Iraq did the organization a lot of harm. I think for me a major turning point was 2011 and the debates in the Security Council about how to respond to the Arab revolutions and specifically Libya and Syria. There was a moment in 2011 when the Security Council united around Libya, but very quickly the big powers fell out over the way that NATO used UN authorization to justify overthrowing (Libya’s late dictator Moammar) Gaddafi and then in Syria we saw a very prolonged battle diplomatically between the US and Russians over the Syrian crisis while hundreds of thousands of people died. And actually, I think it was in Syria that we really started to see the beginning of the diplomatic breakdown between the Russians and the US that has since gathered momentum, most obviously, with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

In 2003, Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council laying out US evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. 
UN Photo/Mark Garten

What are some of your most memorable experiences covering the UN over the years?

There’s a lot of frustration. I think every generation of diplomats that arrives here, if they don’t have previous UN experience, everything seems new, everything seems urgent. But I remember periods in the past when there were countries or crises that were the focus of huge debate and seemed acutely important at the time, but are now forgotten. So in 2005, 2006, we were all talking about Darfur. And in that period, there was a great campaign to get UN peacekeepers into Sudan to stop the mass atrocities taking place in Darfur. Once the peacekeepers arrived in Sudan, the issue was almost forgotten. And UN peacekeepers remained in Sudan for a long time, but it was a much lower agenda item. Similarly, in the Syrian war, there were massive arguments over the siege of Aleppo and violence around Aleppo that really split the Security Council, and the arguments in the Security Council were as passionate as some of the arguments we now see over Ukraine and Gaza, but again, people forget those moments. More positively, I think that there was a moment when it felt like things were starting to get better and that was in 2015 with the Paris Climate Accords, with the Iranian nuclear deal which was negotiated away from the UN but was blessed by the UN and also with the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals. That period towards the end of the second Obama administration was a fairly rosy moment because we were seeing a lot of multilateral deals come together.There was a lot of tension, but it did feel as if maybe the UN was sort of regaining some momentum. Sadly in 2016, suddenly (former US President Donald) Trump came in and the entire picture changed and that sort of really positive moment in 2015 fell apart. Covering the first Trump administration was a roller coaster. It was a lot of fun surprisingly, because suddenly there was a lot of attention to what Trump and the Republicans were doing at the UN, because it was seen as one of the battlegrounds for his “America First” foreign policy. There was a lot of interest in Nikki Haley. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t in some ways enjoy that period. But it was also scary at times, especially towards the end of Trump’s term where he was attacking the World Health Organization. And although I enjoyed covering Trump once, I would not say I’m excited by the idea of having to do it again if he wins an election in November, because I think a second Trump term could be considerably more damaging to the UN than the first Trump term.

“Covering the first Trump administration was a roller coaster’’

The Security Council met today in Geneva concerning the situation in the occupied Arab territories. The meeting was held at the request of the Group of Arab States. This is the first time that the Council has met in Geneva. Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization addresses the members of the Security Council.
UN Photo

Given all the dynamics and differences among member states and talks around reforms, do you think the UN can be reformed?  The world has changed, but the UN hasn’t.

The UN seems to lag behind.  So I think there’s a great desire for reform at the moment. Not only Security Council reform, I think that actually for many UN members, the number one priority is reforms to the international financial institutions. I think that a lot of developing countries would like to see reforms to the World Bank and to the IMF that would make it easier for them to get financing. But  there is also definitely an emphasis on the need for Security Council reform after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and after the war in Gaza. And Antonio Guterres has played an interesting role in expanding discussions of what reform should focus on, because he’s also been suggesting that we need new multilateral arrangements to deal with things like artificial intelligence. So there’s a lot of talk about reform. There’s also a general recognition that is almost universal in the UN membership from the US to developing countries that without reform this institution is going to seem increasingly irrelevant whether because it cannot deal with crises like Gaza or because it cannot regulate new technologies like AI. However, this does make me think back to my very first contacts with the UN back in 2005 when people were talking about Security Council reform. People thought reform was essential and yet reform did not happen because the procedural and political obstacles to really major changes to the international system are extremely high. Security Council reform especially requires changes to the UN Charter which needs the ratification of two thirds of member states. So I worry that although we have a big reform push at the moment aiming at the Summit of the Future in September, we’re going to come away disappointed. I think that there’s a risk that the actual reforms that is possible to agree in September will be quite limited relative to what many people would like to see happen at the UN. On many issues, especially Security Council reform, there isn’t a common ground that it can be found in the next months. But, we can make some progress, I do think that there is probably space for some agreements on improving the international financial architecture. We can at least hope to sort of see the beginnings of discussions about the multilateral regulation of new technologies. There are other small reforms to parts of the UN like the Peace Building Commission which helps states with conflict prevention. Small reforms in those areas I think are possible but I worry that there’s going to be a sort of a hole in the middle of everything especially around Security Council reform where it just won’t be possible to find positions that the majority of member states can back.

Secretary-General António Guterres (front left) speaks with Yamazaki Kazuyuki, Permanent Representative of Japan and President of the Security Council for the month of March, ahead of the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Sudan and South Sudan. The Council heard Reports of the Secretary-General on the Sudan and South Sudan. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

What are some of the proposals for reforming the Security Council?

There are lots of different proposals out there and actually there’s quite a lively process into governmental negotiations in which different groups of states are laying out their ideas. The fundamental divide is between Germany, Japan, India and Brazil on the one hand who want permanent seats and they enjoy quite a lot of support. And then an alternative group called Uniting for Consensus, which opposes the idea of those countries getting permanent seats, but instead says you should have different tiers of seats in the UN. So the current permanent members would retain their current rights, but then you would have a middle tier of countries that have seats for more than two years. There are different proposals, it could be five years, it could be three years. And so there are different versions of what a multi-tier Security Council would look like, but these are the two main approaches. Either you create new permanent members and expand the council as a whole, or you have a slightly larger multi -level, multi-speed Security Council.

In addition to that, we have the big question which everyone acknowledges. Africa is underrepresented in the Security Council, although actually for the past 20 years Africa has been the continent where the council has been most active. And the African group say they would like to have two permanent seats in the Security Council, although they won’t say who would hold those seats. Different states have different positions. Russia says it would like India and Brazil to have permanent seats, but it doesn’t want US allies like Germany and Japan. China is very explicitly opposed to the idea of Japan getting a permanent seat for historical reasons. And the Chinese clearly also don’t want India as another Asian power permanently in the Security Council. The real problem is that aligning all these positions is incredibly hard. Member states are very, very cautious about shifting away from their established positions. It’s very hard to get people to really negotiate, as opposed to just say what they want over and over again, as they’ve been doing for many years. I don’t think we’re going to cut through all those obstacles this year. There are ideas that maybe the Summit of the Future could set a timetable for Security Council reform discussions. We have the 80th anniversary of the San Francisco Conference in 2025 that founded the UN. Maybe you use that as a hook and say, we should try and agree on reforms in the UN’s anniversary year. But I think even that will be pretty hard to get consensus around.

Given all these discussions around whether there should be more permanent members or veto power should be abolished, what specific changes do you think are crucial for the UN to stay relevant?

I’ve worked on Security Council reform on and off for probably more than 10 years. And I really wish I’d worked on something else because it’s a very frustrating topic. And it doesn’t move very quickly. I don’t have a magic solution, I don’t have a clear vision of what answer is best. I think there are three things we should try and keep in mind. First the longer we don’t reform the Security Council the more the Council’s credibility suffers and that’s clear. With each war—each Ukraine, each Gaza, each Sudan—that goes by, the public profile of the UN suffers. Secondly however we get to reform we do have to recognize that the way the council is set up does not reflect current global power realities, it invests a huge amount of power in the winners of the Second World War and it seems to me silly that you have really big global players like India and Brazil who are excluded from having more authority in the Security Council. Whether they get that through a permanent seat or through some other process should be a matter for negotiation. And the last point though is I worry that there are lots of ideas to expand the council. Almost every reform proposal involves making the council bigger. It’s currently 15 members. Their proposals end up with a council between 20 and 30 seats. I do worry a lot that a council involving 20 to 30 members would be enormously inefficient. The one good thing you can say about the Security Council today is that when its members do want to act, they can move remarkably quickly. And actually you can negotiate resolutions and take decisions and respond to crises fairly speedily if there is a political will to do so. Sadly, often there is not a political will, but it’s actually pretty easy for 15 member states to negotiate at high speed. And if you talk to Security Council members, they will all tell you that the speed of decision making in the council is a thousand times faster than debates in the General Assembly or other UN forums. If you enlarge the council to 30, the transaction costs of getting to agreements will simply get higher. And I worry that a Security Council with 25 members would be significantly less efficient and significantly less able to act quickly than the council we have today.

If the next secretary general of the UN were to be female, marking the first in the history of the UN, what impact do you think it would have on both the organization itself and global perceptions of the UN leadership and gender equality efforts?

Actually, when you asked about moments from the last 20 years that I look back on fondly, the 2016 race for the post of Secretary-General was a lot of fun to follow. I was here for the previous race when Kofi Annan’s term ended and Ban Ki-moon took over. But I didn’t follow it that closely. I did follow the 2016 race very closely. And it is fun because it’s the closest we have at the UN to a national election. And there were a lot of quite interesting characters in 2016, such as Kristalina Georgieva, who then went on to head the IMF, Irina Bokova, who had been the head of UNESCO, and then various other people in the race, although Guterres eventually won. I think it is worth saying that in January 2016, the conventional wisdom was that it would have to be a woman. And male candidates like Guterres were actually seen as not very credible and people were looking at people like Bokova or Helen Clark from New Zealand and everyone was saying that it’s got to be a woman’s turn. And it didn’t work out. And now we’re about two years away from the next race. And again, everyone is saying that it has to be a woman. I absolutely agree. But there will be men who insist they’re feminists, but still somehow it’s okay for them to be the next secretary general. And it’s going to be a very, very difficult race because you’re going to have to find someone, whatever their gender, he, she, or they, who is acceptable to China, Russia, and the US. The number of international political figures that all three powers can agree on is pretty small, regardless of their gender. So I think it could be a very difficult race. And I think we could end up with some very unpredictable results. And maybe that means we end up with another man. I really hope not. I think that the fact that you have only had men as UN leaders, as Guterres himself admits, does make the organization look more than ever stuck in the past. I think that a strong female leader would gain a huge amount of international attention. Guterres and his advisors admit that, he sometimes struggles to get the same level of attention as some of his predecessors like Kofi Annan. Global attention is drifting away from the UN, media attention is drifting away from the UN. I think that a strong woman leader of the UN would by definition create a buzz, create excitement and hopefully create some inspiration. It’s also worth noting that we already know there are some pretty impressive female candidates like Mia Mottley of Barbados and a number of female politicians from Latin America who are already in the mix. Amina Mohammed, the Deputy Secretary General may be wondering if she can fill the top job. if somehow we end up with another male politician, that will just do an enormous damage to the UN’s public credibility.

What would the ideal UN look like?

I always tease people because there’s a clause in the UN Charter that has never been activated which says that the UN should have its own Air Force, and maybe if the UN had a massive Air Force, we could enforce peace around the world. We have to sort of accept that we’re in a period of transition, and where I hope we are in 10 years from now is that we have a UN that is still able to act as a clearing house for diplomacy between the big powers, assuming that the big powers are going to continue to have very competitive relationships. I actually worry that especially since February 2022 and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, we have seen the big powers cooperating less and less. But I do think that a UN that is still able to work on issues like the Black Sea Grain Initiative as it did with Turkey, easing the big power tensions is crucial. I also think that we need to have a UN where a wider range of states feel that they actually have a real stake in the organization. I think that you do hear from a lot of representatives of smaller states, non-Western states, that they’re frustrated by the Security Council, but they’re also frustrated by the fact that they feel that a lot of the power here continues to rest with a fairly small club of Western countries. We need a certain sort of rebalancing. I think the alternative to the UN we’ve got is really a very significant breakdown in international cooperation. What we’ve got at the moment is profoundly imperfect and has been failing the people of Myanmar, the people of Ukraine and the people of Israel and Gaza, but I still think we’ve got to try and protect what is valuable in this organization whether it’s humanitarian aid, whether it’s peacekeeping. It’s the Rolling Stones, isn’t it? You can’t always get what you want. But you might get what you need.

Will the UN face existential crises in the absence of reforms?

There are UN agencies that do enormously important things on everything from agriculture to intellectual property and I think we sometimes forget how many areas of international life are regulated or facilitated by the UN. Part of the UN’s work is a bit like Wi -Fi. We just assume that Wi -Fi is everywhere and we’re surprised when it’s not there. Similarly, we’re used to the fact that you have a lot of UN technical agencies that facilitate cooperation between states. And I don’t think anyone wants to get rid of them. But I think there is a risk that the political arms of the UN will shrink and will continue to have less importance. And you may end up in a situation where you have lots of technical agencies doing good work, but no real political UN dealing with wars, dealing with crises. And that will result in more conflict and more suffering.